SEATTLE — Micro soft, weighing a $44.6 billion takeover of Yahoo, may raise its bid by as much as $2 a share.

Microsoft examined a price of $32 to $33 a share in recent days, more than its initial $31 cash-and-stock bid, The Wall Street Journal reported Wed nesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Yahoo wants an offer in the high $30s, and investors have signaled they want as much as $37.

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.